The program is thick and deep with allure. The hot buzz was for Pussy Riot, Paul Kelly and Mogwai — “Did you see Mogwai?’ was Sunday’s refrain. The night before a tall female in Disco Goth waved us down in the street, ‘Want tickets to Mogwai?’ Thanks, but no.

Beyond music, there was artist Mike Parr’s mystery act on Bruny Island. You had to be up at 2am to catch the boat for that, and stay till 5am. The prospective audience was requested to bring a torch, wear closed-toe footwear and be dressed for open air Tassie winter. We know people who went. Insomniac masochists. Then there is the rather frightening protest-magnet Hermann Nitsch who promises live slaughtering and blood letting of cattle with human nudity in a quasi religious ritual. Definitely closed-toe shoes, goggles and maybe a sick bag.

MONA-ARCH IN HIS MONA-RCHY

For everyone there is the free space of Dark Park, and the Winter Feast food and drink hall, free entry after 8pm, with an outdoors area, loud with crowds, revelry and live bands, where everyone seems to end up. In a roped-off corner alcove like a prize animal exhibit, we saw David Walsh, the beaming MONArch of this MONArchy. The vast space is lit by a ceiling hung with red neon crosses and benches traversing the entire length dressed with hundreds of candles. It’s like an epic birthday party for Nick Cave.

To cross from the Feast to Dark Park you tramp past the piers and the hip new hotel MACq01, “a storytelling hotel”, where each guest room displays its own Tasmanian Story. (But perhaps not the one about Risdon Cove.) Then you arrive at the Art School where every student seems to have been assigned a showcase window. The most popular mode was interactive — students on the inside press their hands to the glass and passersby put their hands against theirs. This was repeated in three variations including figures in full body socks. Also behind glass was a woman sitting in a mountain crevasse of bubble wrap, carefully cutting out single bubbles and placing them in a jar. A mystery, but no cattle harmed.

IN A VERY DARK PARK

At the very popular Dark Park there is a variety of diversions, all free. On an as yet undeveloped industrial site, it’s as unlit as advertised. ‘Lots of HS&E issues here,’ joked one of my companions as we stumbled around. For choice there is a Balinese-inspired giant potato-shaped furnace, Ogoh-ogoh, where you can burn notes inscribed with your deepest fears, but which also looked like an excellent pizza oven.

There is Marco Fusinato’s Extended Breakdown in a mist- and industrial debris-filled warehouse with spook lighting. Earplugs are provided as you enter — it’s at least as loud as the last teen party you accidentally crashed. Actually it hurt my ears and didn’t improve my headache, so I left within a minute. Even viewing 10 seconds of a version of Extended Breakdown on youtube hurts my ears. People with princess hearing, don’t do it! We lost a friend to the racket — he came out 10 minutes later pounding his chest. ‘Really gets you here’ he shouted at us. Don’t shout, we shouted back, making deaf gestures.

The highlight is Chris Levine’s light installation, iy_project. First created in Hastings, UK, it’s the unmissable centrepiece, mounted on three enormous pylons. These have laser lights projecting through vapour to a dreamy ambient soundtrack by Robert del Naja of Massive Attack and Marco Perry. (Essentially a highly evolved descendant of Anthony McCall’s light pieces of the 1970s.) You stand among hundreds in the immersive dark, the air above animated by laser fields in red. As vapour flows across the beams it conjures a cosmic dawn of clouds. This is sheer spectacle, like fireworks for a new apocalyptic era. (Follow the beams to a distant barn structure for a bonus interior light show.)

LET ME SAVE YOU AN HOUR

For a disappointing anticlimax you can wait on a ramp for an hour in the cold, as we did, to view The Sound of Silence by the political artist Alfredo Jaar (it only seats 30 people per screening). It’s purportedly an 8-minute silent film about a single photograph, but they don’t tell you even this much — hey, it’s a surprise/mystery/art.

What it is [—spoiler spoiler—] is a sequence of white text on a black screen, with the image appearing for a second towards the end, plus a special effect of a single blinding strobe flash. The text tells a brief story of Kevin Carter who took what became a very controversial photo and who killed himself shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the picture. (Here it is: ‘the vulture and the little girl’). The film is intended to be an interrogation of the nexus between “photography, and violence and human suffering,” but in our annoyed consensus The Sound of Silence is a visually inert piece of moral grandstanding that at the end also incoherently tries to drag Bill Gates and the entire image industry into complicity. For an actual interrogation, check out Susan Sontag’s Regarding The Pain of Others. Poor Kevin Carter, after his short (1960-1994) and pained life, he’s now rolling in his grave.

Rather unexpectedly, and perhaps characteristically Hobartian, the plug on Dark Park is promptly pulled at 10pm. We wandered home through the noisy streets cheerful, cold and bright.

]]>https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/06/16/hobart-dark-mofo/feed/0John Clarke, We Need You More Than Everhttps://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/04/11/john-clarke-need-ever/
https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/04/11/john-clarke-need-ever/#respondMon, 10 Apr 2017 23:06:53 +0000http://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/?p=13825Kind, dry and cheerful, John Clarke was a comic genius "interested in everything, but nothing else."

FUTURE BUMMERDon’t think, we tell the kids,that bad things aren’t happening
right now. That it’s all behind us and will never happen to you.Remember: There is …NO NORMAL!, they chant right back.
Something we learn
in painful instalments.

]]>https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/01/23/o-bummer-potus-2017/feed/0Nine Powerpoints on John Bergerhttps://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/01/09/nine-powerpoints-john-berger/
https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2017/01/09/nine-powerpoints-john-berger/#commentsSun, 08 Jan 2017 22:19:30 +0000http://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/?p=13774John Berger (1926-2017) was one of the most influential critics of the last fifty years, extracting radical content from tradition.

ONE — Berger always begun with, or eventually arrived at, love. Once he wrote, remarkably, that seeing the beloved can be recognised as love itself, even more fully realised than through sex: ‘When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness that only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.’

TWO — Berger’s writing is wide and deep, radical and wrought. His famous “Ways of Seeing” (1972) begins ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.’ He was interested in compression, in the aphoristic, he used a broad brush. His was a high-pressure style which forced away alternatives.

THREE — The tone of the following remark exemplifies why Berger’s work is so compelling and also effectively without irony or humour: ‘What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told, and that if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told.’

FOUR — Famously a lifelong Marxist, Berger was yet acutely conscious of the individual and the stakes of subjectivity: ‘Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented … and thus by implication how the subject had been seen by other people … the specific vision of the image-maker became part of the record … how X had seen Y.’ Berger never became a Communist: ‘I had reservations about the party line in relation to the arts.’

FIVE — He blew up Sir Kenneth Clark, that is to say, a traditional art view of the female nude. ‘Clark maintains that to be naked is to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art.’ Berger’s revision: ‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.’ More to the point: ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’

SIX — His gloss on Walter Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is deceptively succinct: ‘The uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of the reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique.’ Of course, in digitally-based new media art, the reproduction and the “original” are the same.

SEVEN — Berger wrote about artists as a writer who drew and once painted. He often guessed with his eye and hand what writers on art often miss, the sensual triggers for the work. He braided poetry into his writing to sound out what was unsayable in prose, and was particularly good on painters. If Robert Hughes could smartly nail the artist and their oeuvre, Berger opened windows to scope the artist’s furthest shore. He wrote, ‘Rothko turned painting inside out because the colours he so laboriously created are waiting to depict things which do not yet exist.’ Berger was a thoroughgoing materialist but he believed in the ancient project of art.

EIGHT — ‘Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects … As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.’ Or one might say, painting is property. (In response to an attack he wrote: ‘We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question that is so obsessed.’)

NINE — He saw himself as a witness to the times. ‘Perhaps I am like all people who tell stories … storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people … This is perhaps why I use the term “being a witness.” One is witness of others but not of oneself.’ And what the witness does is raise the alarm, or testify after the fact. John Berger was a star witness.

—o—

ADDENDUM:
Berger wrote, ‘Metaphor is needed. Metaphor is temporary. It does not replace theory.’ But perhaps it is theory, or theories, that come and go and metaphor that stands. More than thirty years ago in a poem he was already elegiac. Here are the first and last stanzas:

When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time of a train
I look at your face.
. . .
And our faces, my heart, brief as
photos.

In the book which houses that poem he circles at the end back to love. Berger was Marxist by conviction and romantic by instinct; the object of his need to believe was the reality of a person, which is actually to say, his relationship to that person. Here, the metaphor is permanent:

‘What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered together … One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis … With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.’

But largesse and recognition from the secretive gollums of Stockholm are only of use to the under-recognised. There is no sensible reason for the celebrated Philip Roth or Les Murray to keep anxious watch on their mobiles every October.

And of course there is also no reason for Bob to decline the glory and $$$$ but the N-committee has confused meatballs and herring, wishfully giving a prize for a category that doesn’t exist on their list, ie Music.

Dylan had a prodigious youth, producing all his seminal works by the time he was 35 with Blood on the Tracks and Desire (1975-76) — though inspired as he is he has produced any number of mid and late career gems. His extraordinary verbal facility (William Blake via Rimbaud and the Beats) that remade the rock lyric is only one component of a spectrum of qualities that make up the Bob Dylan experience. Way up there is also his amazing if less celebrated melodic gift. Then there is the distinctive timbre of the “high, wild mercury sound” (hat tipping the “high lonesome sound” of bluegrass) that was unleashed on Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, guaranteed to provoke a pavlovian response from any Boomer.

He created a mystery persona, still defensively deflective and opaque to this day, and authorised a whole new aesthetic for the voice: ugly is truthful is beautiful. For beyond the early phenomenal albums his body of work is about the electricity of performance — his Never Ending Tour. Since 1988 Dylan has played over 2800 live shows to millions of fans, taking the nasal wail of his mature vocals through to its magnificent wreck in the late 1990s and now to its final, disconcerting ruin. The living artist can always communicate things beyond the set text of words and music.

There is a niagara-like grandeur to Dylan’s life work which the Nobel prize does not begin to comprehend, as it tries to corral that sprawl into the polite ghetto of world Literature with the tepid accolade: “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. The gollums should scuttle back behind their mahogany doors before Kanye and Kendrick turn their gaze to Sweden.

]]>‘Painting is dead,’ said Paul Delaroche in 1839, a French painter ironically best known for his fateful quote. That was the year the world was introduced to the daguerreotype, the photograph as we know it.

Recently the art critic for Melbourne’s and Sydney’s non-Murdoch dailies wrote: ‘Painters and curators know that painting is dead but have powerful incentives to believe that it might be revived.’

WHY PAINTING LIVES

But I say, No! Painting lives! And it will outlive all its critics. Nobody asks why singers sing and tells them to stop, or criticises dancers for dancing. Or tells children to stop drawing and sloshing paint around — ‘Darlings, painting is dead, we must use new media now.’ Has anyone advised the elders in Arnhem land to tell their people to stop all that daubing? That they need to get some tech to plug and play?

Paintings happen because painting, like modelling forms in clay, like sounding notes by voice or object, is a prehistoric cultural meme. It flourished before the glories of text. How pompously can I put it? To paint is one way to be human.

Kate Benyon’s winning entry at the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize

At the ACCA painting show, Gareth Sansom’s picture is the blue and pink.

PAINTING IS EVERYWHERE

Painting: Dead? Not dead? (See cute google trend chart). Beyond one smallish corner of the art world, No, Bo, Dy, cares. At the moment we have a painting show at ACCA, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art — an A-Z rollcall of painting worthies, young and old. A big Degas show just finished at the NGV which now hosts a big retrospective of John Olsen, the grand seigneur of Australian painting.

Beyond the city, there’s the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize — exclusively painting. Hamilton has shows of Streeton, John Wolseley, and young Will Mackinnon, three painters across overlapping timespans, and Horsham just concluded a show of five contemporary painters. Both Bendigo and Ballarat galleries are having their drawing prize shows, which not only have strong affinities to painting, but includes quite a bit of painting-drawing. And, of course, commercial galleries are awash with painting.

As a hip gallerist was overheard to say at the Tarrawarra Biennial — ‘I like things that can be bought and sold and hung on a wall’. And marketwise, public-wise, it seems most people not on the cutting edge of art conversations agree. That need not worry artists, curators, critics and edgy gallerists. There is room for everyone, and if we were all in the avant-garde (now, there’s a dead term) then where would the cool crowd go?

THE CRITIC WRITES

There’s a fun if acidic conversation going on at the moment between the Fairfax critic, Robert Nelson, and the painters Gareth Sansom and John Kelly. Nelson has slagged off (an accurate localism) both the ACCA painting and John Olsen shows. Nelson may have offered some faint praise to Olsen and gold stars to a few artists at ACCA, but he did not like the shows. He was professionally critical, or plainly insulting, in any case he had strong opinions.

On the ACCA show: ‘Nowadays, most painters lack most skills in painting…Painters and curators know that painting is dead but have powerful incentives to believe that it might be revived.’

On Olsen: ‘The more John Olsens that you put into a room, the uglier it becomes…The best paintings with their tangle of tentacles are only mildly entertaining. They have little profundity.’

(Above: Robert Nelson in a video introduction to his 2011 book, “The Visual Language of Painting”. He begins: ‘Painting rewards in ways that are hard to fathom. The people who know it best, namely painters, are often the least likely to explain its seduction.’ He goes on to talk about “visuality” in painting and ends, ‘it is my attempt to demystify the peculiar magic of representational pictures made by hand.’)

THE PAINTERS REPLY

Gareth Sansom is one of the artists currently at ACCA — about 10 years ago in the Australian, Sebastian Smee, now the Pulitzer-prize winning art critic for the Boston Globe, called him ‘for my money, the most exciting painter in Australia today.’ On Saturday 17 September, addressing a sizeable audience in front of his ACCA painting, Sansom took a swipe: ‘Periodically there is some idiot saying, Painting is dead. In fact, some idiot in the Age is saying it every five years.’

John Kelly, in the Daily Review, offers a passionate defence of painting, and points out that video art (which Nelson had mentioned favourably over painting) was at this moment more like old hat than new tech. And he suggests that Nelson may be playing a theatrical provocateur parading a Look-At-Me routine. Anyway, Kelly also asks some pertinent questions:

‘Should any medium be separated by a kind of artistic apartheid? Will ACCA present similar exhibitions based on sculpture, printmaking or installation/video art? Is painting part of a broader contemporary culture or does it have a special status, given its longevity as the Methuselah of Art? Does this separation elevate or undermine its artistic currency that continues to turn in its grave despite the regular last rites proffered?’

MY GALLERY HAS MANY ROOMS

Pardon the Biblical allusion (John 14:2) prompted by Methuselah, but here’s the thing — outside the white cube, Nobody Cares if Painting is Dead. Because people like painting.

That is why, for instance, the perennially panned Archibald Prize is such a big deal. And why the Portrait Gallery in Canberra draws visitors. They show images of recognisable subjects in a time-honoured medium, visibly wrought with artisanal labour. (Indicatively, both ACCA and Geelong shows are pretty evenly divided between abstraction and figuration.) One hundred years on from the dawn of Modernism and the peak of Cubism, people are still adjusting. As William Gibson wrote, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.’

The celebrated David Hockney — a painting holdout despite his fondness for adopting tech — with a show slated later this year at the NGV, was talking about good and bad painting to an interviewer when he was interrupted for his opinion about contemporary art. Hockney said something to this effect: ‘We were talking about painting, but Art, now, that’s a MUCH bigger subject.’ Which is to say, painting is a practice which is art, but also one that goes on regardless of “Art”. People will keep looking at paintings, and people will keep making paintings whether or not people look at it. To paint is to be human.

There is room for art in the wretched craziness of the human world, and room in the art world for all kinds of painting.

]]>Australian literature is in peril — this is not an exaggeration. The Turnbull government says that it will remove PIR (parallel import restrictions) on books, a copyright arrangement that has allowed Australia to punch well above its weight to become the14th largest publishing industry in the world, without any government subsidies. Consumers can already buy books online from anywhere — but the government wants to take territorial rights away from our authors and publishers, even though these rights are protected in the US, the UK and Canada. Defend books. Don’t vote for the Coalition.

]]>https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2016/06/20/defend-oz-lit-1-richard-flanagan/feed/0DEFEND OZ LIT #1: Tim Wintonhttps://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2016/06/17/defend-oz-lit-1-tim-winton-vs-govt/
https://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2016/06/17/defend-oz-lit-1-tim-winton-vs-govt/#respondThu, 16 Jun 2016 23:52:30 +0000http://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/?p=13726This is the first in a series of e-posters of Australian authors and overseas colleagues speaking up for their rights. Watch this space for more, from Richard Flanagan, Magda Szubanski, Jonathan Franzen, Jackie French, Toni Jordan, Jeanette Winterson, Tom Keneally and friends.

Australian literature is in peril — this is not an exaggeration. The Turnbull government says that it will remove PIR (parallel import restrictions) on books, a copyright arrangement that has allowed Australia to punch well above its weight to become the14th largest publishing industry in the world, without any government subsidies. Consumers can already buy books online from anywhere — but the government wants to take territorial rights away from our authors and publishers, even though these rights are protected in the US, the UK and Canada. Defend books. Don’t vote for the Coalition.http://bookscreateaustralia.com.au

Prince was good at surprises, and if his death in a domestic elevator in Paisley Park was banal (was he going up, or down?), he fell on a slow news day and garnered all the attention his singular reign deserves.

He provided, as they say, the soundtrack (or maybe the dance tracks) to the lives of me and my friends — if you didn’t like his music, it would have been hard to be friends; it wasn’t “about” the music, it was that he exemplified a particular attitude to being in and dealing with the world. It was his sheer erotic engagement with life — you knew he loved what he was doing and that was wholly infectious. It was a kind of philosophy, a generation after Dylan and the Beatles, it was hippie love – “If it feels good, do it” – repurposed: “Let’s Go Crazy“.

Coming up on the tails of the Brit New Romantics, Prince was a Funk Romantic, with his deployment of lurid colours, exaggerated silhouettes in shoulder shapes, hair and frills, and his necessarily high heels.

He crystallised the idea of pop auteur: writing, playing everything, producing, performing. His music had all the beats and grooves, and squalling guitars; but it’s worth recalling that the Dionysian funk that ensued was a result of an Appollonian discipline. You don’t get to MAKE all that music without being dedicated to the craft. (The film biopic of Brian Wilson, Love and Mercy, has a wonderful sequence of the obsessive attention making music requries.)

I remember talking to a hippie-throwback acquaintance who said about the Purple Rain album: ‘Yeah, Prince has got some moves, but he’s like not real? He’s no Jimi Hendrix.’ It’s hard to recall when Prince was a usurper, since he became a touchstone. He passed his hits around. Sinead O’Connor, of course, but also one of my favourites, a song of empowerment, “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” I had no idea then that Janet Jackson was singing Prince. [I have been corrected: Prince covered this song by Janet Jackson, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. *sigh*]

The NYT has republished a smart piece from 2007 by Jon Pareles: ‘His career is heading into its fourth decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead [Prince] figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music.’ And that’s the business and existential question for any artist, how do you keep doing the thing you love, but also not become your own shadow, your own cover band? Prince figured it out, he still led the way.

For my generation, Prince was King. We’ll be partying to Prince all weekend, like it’s still 1999.